Success is a concept that everyone appreciates, although its meaning can lead to many alternative interpretations. Not everyone succeeds in the same, familiar way. But, in many small ways, everyone can succeed a little, or so we were told as children. However, the jury may still be out on a final verdict.
For the many Americans of all flavors that I have encountered over the years, a successful life would be one with challenges and difficulties that were neatly faced and overcome, so that in the “golden years” of their retirement, parents could enjoy and appreciate their visiting, grownup children in a solidly middle-class neighborhood that is nestled in a quiet pastoral community, but, hopefully, not amidst the harried and desperately striving, working-class individuals, who reluctantly always maintain the lowest societal rungs of our society. For these people, success means no longer having to struggle year in and year out just to stay above the waterline of their lonely, empty boat so that the next wave, like an emergency payment, does not capsize their entire family structure.
An Ideal Situation
In an ideal case, one might expect to find in this setting several attractive, single-family, Victorian houses (this was before the appearance of the ranch-style home) each surrounded by a pristine white-picket-fence and sitting on a grassy lot garnished with local bushes and pretty flowers.
This American dream of owning an attractive house far away from the noise plus the soot and grime of industrial, city life became the universal goal, a fantasy in most cases, that the new world of television broadcasting brought to our modest tenement living-rooms in the late 1940s through the beginning of 1960s.
From my observations, however, the more typical Lowell immigrant textile and the leather worker had practically no personal savings in his/her bank account after decades of employment (often only partial employment) in the massive, red-brick textile mills that lay half-vacant across the city’s crumbling landscape. In a severe situation, such an older worker could, in some cases, find shelter, food, and human kindness under the caring auspices of a family member or a friend.
Even today, I can easily come up with three, family cases showing this kind of fraternal charity at work during the 1940s and 1950s. Yet, some people went without and became the economic ghosts or lost ones wandering the streets of a once-great industrial city. They were spotted by us kids (we were not always sensitive to the sentiments of the needy)around Kearney Square on Saturday mornings selling their pencils that were placed in a weather-beaten, brown felt hat, which was sitting by their outstretched legs.
With a modicum of business “street smarts”, these indigent, sidewalk entrepreneurs had learned not to disturb the familiar flow of busy shoppers with their gangly, outstretched, human appendages. It seems that every successful professional in any trade or business must adapt to the needs of those paying customers.
Uncle Lucien, Dad’s Oldest Brother – A Success Story
As an example of family success, my favorite uncle, Lucien Bolduc, was a product of Lowell High School some years before the start of World War I. After several, war-front experiences in the trenches of France as an enlisted man, he, later, obtained the opportunity to attend the U.S. military academy at West Point. However, such a lucky break was not available to many Lowell young men at the time. Clearly, his character, composure, and his military record had stirred the attention of a few political figures, who wrote important, supportive letters of recommendation on his behalf.
This was just another case proving that “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” as Louis Pasteur had reminded us, many years before. The message was clear, if an opportunity comes knocking at your door, don’t simply slam it shut.
In Lucien’s case, World War II and the Cold War activities in Central Europe framed the background for a rewarding military career, which my whole family applauded, again and again, over the decades. Indeed, his story was the very inspiration that I needed when I first considered admission to Lowell-Tech, now called U-Mass-Lowell, in September 1957.
Here, the message is clear as a bell. When a close relative extracts himself/herself from a discouraging, educational and cultural milieu with little to no future, such a living example can stir hope in the hearts and minds of the next generation. This grain of hope becomes the antidote to all the doubts and misconceptions, which can easily terrify the new family candidate looking for a career start.
More on Lucien and My Grandfather, the Postal Worker
As a young boy, Lucien, while living with his family of mother, father, and four other siblings in a Centralville, neighborhood located near the Hildreth St. Cemetery, could well judge the likelihood of a rewarding life as an adult wage-earner through the severe, roller-coaster activities faced by his mother and father in his early years.
One might consider that his father had eventually attained a respectable career goal after spending his first ten years of half-time employment at the US Post Office in the city followed by another twenty years of full-time work (1918 to 1938) with the government.
Some really successful and well-to-do people might easily dismiss my uncle’s career triumphs as of little consequence, but one must recall that, during the Depression years, very few workers had any steady employment to fall back on. So, in a basic evaluation of success, this raw immigrant person from the farms outside Montreal had managed to get himself and his large family partially integrated into American life of the times.
Success Stories of Other Immigrant Types
During my growing up years, the typical Franco-American dream for a better future appeared quite similar to the open aspirations expressed by other immigrant families such as the Irish, Greek, Portuguese, Italian, Armenian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Russo-Jewish persons, who usually chose to reside in their selected cultural neighborhoods.
As a young lad, I often had occasion to stroll through these ethnic territories on my way to pay a bill for my Mom on Market Street or, in my teens, to return home on foot from seeing a movie at the Rialto or at the RKO Keith theaters. Missing the bus meant that a long walk home might culminate an evening’s activities.
Many trips through the extended Little Canada region also gave me the basis for saying that we, Canucks, were generally living just as well as or as poorly as the other ethnic folks in town. Three and four-story tall, wooden tenement buildings (often cold water flats) that usually were in crying need of an immediate, urban renewal effort, highlighted these various treks through the city over the years.
We were all blessed with a democratic and fair distribution of marginal, unfulfilled needs regarding food, employment, housing, home heat, electricity, transportation, clothing, educational advancement, health care, etc., but in a curious sense, we all felt equal and even guardedly friendly toward one another in our shared tragic-comedy. Fellini ought to have been there to capture on film this human carnival.
The take-home message might be that democracy at the local level can nurture the human spirit, even when real, material abundance was, but a concept described with pleasant examples in the Encyclopedia Britannica. However, we all had our Sears and Roebuck catalog at home to nurture our future dreams.
Life, sometimes, gives us a chance to view other people and events in a whimsical, yet, deeply philosophical new way. Life in the Lowell of my youth gave me glimpses of important discoveries and lessons daily. This type of “street training” is an excellent preparation for facing the bigger world out there, where unknown monsters might reside in dark and shadowy recesses.
More Stories of Immigrant Life
The Lowell Sun often described in its local news section the personal activities, graduations, family reunions, new arrivals, family celebrations, and ethnic festivities happening in Greater Lowell, which might be of interest to the general community. In this way, we were all kept aware of our surroundings, the little world that we all shared.